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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
The "What would Jesus do" industry was born in Topeka, Kan., in the 1890s. A Congregationalist minister named Charles Sheldon coined the phrase, making it the centerpiece of what was then merely an attempt to hold his parishioner's attention.
"He was kind of a showman," says Timothy Miller, a religion professor at the University of Kansas, and the author of a Sheldon biography. "He was looking for ways to entice people back to Sunday night services, so he hit on this idea of serial sermons and went with it."
The lectures weren't exactly literary. Written in simple language, they focused on several characters -- a newspaper publisher, a singer -- who promise to ask "What would Jesus do?" before every decision. In the age of temperance, the answers were often not what one might expect today -- the characters repeatedly resolve that Jesus would stop acting selfish and go help the drunks down in "the rectangle," a mythical slum.
The narratives worked -- in part because Sheldon was a fan of cliffhangers. "They were essentially soap operas," Miller says. "He'd quit just at the point where something great was threatening. The parishioners loved it."
They weren't alone. Sheldon also attracted a crowd in print. He published the sermons in a national Congregationalist magazine in 1896. The magazine then published the sermons together as a book -- "In His Steps" -- that quickly became a bestseller. By the end of 1898, says Miller, one publisher reported sales of 390,000. During the 1910s and '20s sales remained steady; there was an unexplainable spike in sales during the 1930s, and even now it has yet to fall out of print. As of the 1980s, the book had appeared in 20 languages, been published by close to 80 different houses and sold no less than 10 million copies, according to Miller's research.
This was possible only because of a copyright snafu. Unbeknownst to Sheldon, the magazine he chose to publish in wasn't copyrighted, so the book wasn't either. Sheldon didn't discover this until two years after the book came out. Yet, he largely didn't mind.
"He wasn't very resentful because it caused the book to spread very rapidly," says Garrett Sheldon, Charles Sheldon's great-grandson, a political science professor at the University of Virginia at Wise, and the author of an updated version of "In His Steps."
"It probably wouldn't have sold so many copies if it wasn't in the public domain," adds Sheldon.
Plus, a few of the publishers did pay him; Miller estimates that Sheldon received about $10,000. These payments -- tips, essentially -- are a far cry from the millions he would have earned had he copyrighted even half the copies sold. Yet, Garrett Sheldon admits that there was a trickle-down effect. He believes that his updated version -- which came out in 1993 -- would never have been published if the original had not already been so well-known. It also wouldn't have sold as well if not for Tinklenberg's bracelets and the W.W.J.D. marketing bandwagon that those items created.
So, can one conclude, then, that Sheldon is a critic of copyright? That the realities of Christian merchandising and distribution put him in the ranks of today's Napster fans -- the online music traders who declare to anyone who will listen that looser copyright laws will benefit everyone?
Not quite. Sheldon, like Tinklenberg, isn't certain whether copyright helps or hurts. "On the one hand, I'm glad my book has a copyright," he says. "On the other hand, the W.W.J.D. movement greatly helped my book and my sense is that it never would have happened if not for the lack of copyright. The solution may be to have a certain amount of protection in some places but not in all."
Specifically, Sheldon suggests, maybe the law should focus a little less on compensation and more on dilution. The problem with today's culture and the intellectual property laws that purport to protect it has nothing to do with theft, but rather with mimicry. "When my great-grandfather wrote his book 100 years ago, no one wrote an imitation," he says. There was a gentlemen's ethic, even in business. If something became popular, you didn't immediately put out an imitation just to take advantage of the fad. But since my book came out and the W.W.J.D. craze hit, publishers have put out more than 30 books with 'What would Jesus do?' in the title. Far too many of them are just in it for the money."
